Passage Excerpt from “The Food Business Incubator”
Excerpt from “The Food Business Incubator”
by Mandalit Del Barco
“La Cocina” means “the kitchen” in Spanish. It’s also the name of a business incubator1 based in San Francisco’s Mission District. Since it began in 2005, it’s been helping local food entrepreneurs, many of whom are low-income immigrant women, develop their small businesses.
Over the years, many of its alumni have found success: more than 50 chefs in its program have become self-sufficient business owners, and many of them have opened their own brick-and-mortar restaurants. Two alumnae of its culinary program . . . were even recognized as semi-finalists for prestigious James Beard awards.2
A new cookbook, We Are La Cocina: Recipes in Pursuit of the American Dream, tells some of their stories.
Executive director Caleb Zigas says the nonprofit La Cocina grew out of two grassroots economic development organizations3 who found many people cooking at their homes and selling food on the streets. The vendors needed an affordable commercial kitchen space and technical assistance in order for their businesses to be legally viable. La Cocina provided just such a space, in addition to helping them develop business plans, pull city permits and more.
Zigas says as many as eight businesses can work in the kitchen space at La Cocina at any one time. Some can prep for a farmers’ market sale, corporate catering gigs or weddings, while others might be making and packaging their food products.
“It’s just an incredible and exciting range of techniques, flavors, perspectives, age, language. And that’s a really beautiful thing,” he says. . . .
Twice a year, La Cocina hosts “F&B: Voices from the Kitchen,” a storytelling project where their chefs can tell their own stories, as they do in the new cookbook. Some of the chefs will be on tour to promote the book, whose proceeds will go to support La Cocina entrepreneurs.
NPR4 caught up with . . . La Cocina chefs, who shared their stories:
Mariko Grady, Aedan Fermented Foods
At La Cocina, you can often hear Mariko Grady singing or humming as she prepares miso, koji, and amasake. Her fermented products come in four different flavors, including mushroom and chicken, to be used in soups and sauces. She originally brought the fermenting rice and barley koji seeds from Japan, where she had a 30-year career as a singer and dancer with the prestigious modern theatrical dance group she founded, Pappa Tarahumara. They performed around the world, and 16 years ago, had a one-night show in San Francisco. The man who would become her husband was in the audience. She soon joined him in San Francisco, often returning to Tokyo to rehearse. But after the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in 2011, her company disbanded. . . . Grady focused on nourishing her family and creating a line of fermented products that she sells online, at local Bay Area stores and at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. She began at La Cocina in 2012 and named her business after her son, Aedan. (Written in Kanji characters, the name means “wisdom” and “handed down from generation to generation.”) . . . Her fermented products are “also full of wisdom about how to relate to nature and how to create a healthy life,” she says. . . .
Shani Jones, Peaches Patties
Shani Jones is a native San Franciscan. Her father was born in New Orleans, her mother, in Jamaica. She says their home was always filled with a variety of spices and dishes like jerk chicken and Jamaican patties—savory pastries filled with beef or chicken. Jones says she learned to cook from her mother, whose nickname was Peaches. After returning from college in Atlanta, Jones worked on her doctorate in organizational leadership and management while driving a Lyft5 car. She often told passengers about her idea of opening a catering company with her mom’s recipes. They steered her to La Cocina, where she developed her own business, named after her mother. Five years later, she caters and runs a kiosk6 at a small food cooperative in Bernal Heights, where some of her handmade patties have an Ethiopian twist, “because my husband is Ethiopian.” Jones has big aspirations for Peaches Patties: “The ultimate goal,” she says, “is to be the patty kingpin7 of the West Coast.”
From “The Food Business Incubator That Helps Immigrant Women Pursue The American Dream” by Mandalit Del Barco from WEEKEND EDITION SUNDAY, June 19, 2019. Copyright © 2019 NPR.
QUALIFICATIONS FOR LA COCINA APPLICANTS
| Level of Income | La Cocina considers assets and access to opportunity when screening applicants. La Cocina’s mission is to support entrepreneurs who face barriers to becoming successful in the food industry. Applicants must be classified as low- or very-low-income earners according to the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Guidelines for San Francisco. |
|---|---|
| Business Plan | Applicants must have a business plan that is ready to be put into action. La Cocina will help applicants refine an existing business plan. Applicants without a business plan should contact one of La Cocina’s partner organizations for guidance in developing one. |
| Viable Product | The applicant’s food must not only be delicious but also stand out. For a business to make a profit, there also has to be a market for the food. |
| Entrepreneurial Work Ethic | La Cocina is excited to work with entrepreneurs who are motivated and passionate about growing their business. Succeeding in the food industry requires a lot of heart and hard work. |
| Community Spirit | The 30+ entrepreneurs who share La Cocina’s kitchen are from many different backgrounds. La Cocina values the community it has created and expects each entrepreneur to be active in bringing the spirit of La Cocina to the wider world. In order to succeed in the La Cocina kitchen, accepted applicants must be flexible and willing to work closely with others. |
Source: La Cocina
1business incubator: company that helps new and startup companies develop by providing services such as management training and office space
2James Beard awards: an award named after American cook and author James Beard, considered one of the highest honors in the culinary industry
3economic development organizations: organizations whose mission is to promote economic improvement within a specific geographical area
4NPR: National Public Radio, a nonprofit media organization that produces and distributes news and cultural programming
5Lyft: ride-sharing company where people use their own cars to provide rides to customers
6kiosk: cart or small structure with one or more open sides that is used to vend merchandise or services
7kingpin: the leader in a group or undertaking
Question
The table provides additional support for a central idea of the excerpt by
- Ashowing how La Cocina works with partner organizations to further educate and advance successful applicants within the food industry.
- Bexplaining how applicants are prepared to develop their own businesses once they leave La Cocina.
- Cestablishing that La Cocina is dedicated to its mission to provide delicious food to different communities.
- Demphasizing that applicants must be willing to dedicate time to promoting and developing their business with La Cocina.
Show the answer
Correct answer: D
The question asks how the table provides additional support for a central idea of the excerpt.
A. Incorrect. The table describes the requirements that allow food entrepreneurs to qualify to participate in La Cocina. While the table does mention that applicants without a business plan should contact one of La Cocina’s partner organizations, it does not specifically explain how La Cocina works with these partner organizations to help educate successful applicants.
B. Incorrect. The table describes the ways entrepreneur chefs must qualify in order to be accepted into La Cocina, not how their businesses can be successful after they leave.
C. Incorrect. While the table mentions community spirit, this is in reference to the type of energy La Cocina wishes to establish within its group kitchen space. The excerpt and table do not discuss providing food to different communities within or outside San Francisco as specific goals of La Cocina.
D. CORRECT. A central idea of the excerpt is that La Cocina helps local food entrepreneurs develop their businesses. The table lists requirements for people who want to participate in La Cocina. They must be willing to work hard to promote their own businesses as they use the resources that La Cocina provides.
Question analysis
This question asks how the table “Qualifications for La Cocina Applicants,” printed after the NPR article, provides additional support for a central idea of the excerpt. The table’s five rows, from level of income to community spirit, are written in full sentences, so students must read it as closely as the article and decide how the two connect.
- Grade level
- Grade 8 reading and task
- Compared with grade 7
- Above grade 7 Grade 7 readers often connect a table to a text. This one holds five rows of requirements written as sentences, not numbers, and students must tie it to a central idea through long choices, more than typical grade 7 work.
- Estimated difficulty
- Hard: combines ideas, needs a plan, and has more than one tempting wrong answer.
- Thinking it demands
- Depth of knowledge 3, strategic thinking · mainly analyze
- What makes it hard
- Reading a figure, table or graph moderate
- The right answer is reworded moderate
- Combines ideas minor
- Evidence
- Answered from the whole text
- Reading level
- Passage: about grade 10, 1057 words; question and choices: about grade 13, 81 words.
- Corrected from the DOE handbook
- A detail of the table was restated accurately in the explanation.
- Students, last 30 days
- Not enough answers yet to show (it takes 10).
Why it is hard, traps and wrong answers (shows the answer)
Why it is hard
The table is easy to read row by row but hard to connect, because it lists entry requirements while the article describes help and success. Each wrong choice grabs a real phrase from the table or an idea from the article, partner organizations, delicious food, alumni starting their own businesses, and attaches it to a claim the table does not make. The right choice is the only one that sums up several rows at once, the work ethic and community spirit expected of applicants.
Reading a figure, table or graph moderate Understanding the question
The table holds five rows of full sentences, and the telling details sit in single phrases: “should contact one of La Cocina’s partner organizations,” “a lot of heart and hard work,” “active in bringing the spirit of La Cocina to the wider world.” (Lesh, Post & Behr, 1987; Kirsch & Mosenthal, 1990)
The right answer is reworded moderate Choosing the answer
The right choice speaks of dedicating time to “promoting and developing” a business, words the table never uses, while wrong choices lift its own “partner organizations,” “mission,” “delicious” and “community.” (Freedle & Kostin, 1993; Kirsch & Mosenthal, 1990)
Combines ideas minor Working it out
Students must join two sources, a central idea of the article, that La Cocina helps cooks develop businesses, and a table about who may apply, then say what the second adds to the first. (Embretson, 1998; Daniel & Embretson, 2010)
Strategy: Sum up each row of the table in a few words, state a central idea of the article in a sentence, and keep only a choice that the rows actually show and that fits that idea.
Traps
- Word match: Repeats striking words or phrases from the text, so it looks supported, but its meaning does not fit the question.
- Twists what the text says: Uses the text's topic and ideas but changes what it says: who did it, how much, when, or why.
- Wrong part of the text: A choice is true of another paragraph, stanza or speaker than the one asked about.
The wrong answers, classified
A Twists what the text says (King et al., 2004)
Finds the partner organizations in the Business Plan row, but the table sends only applicants without a plan to them for guidance and says nothing about further training for accepted chefs.
B Wrong part of the text (Kirsch & Mosenthal, 1990)
Carries over the article’s alumni who opened their own restaurants and its help with permits, but the table covers who may enter La Cocina, not how members are prepared to leave.
C Word match (Freedle & Kostin, 1993)
Strings the table’s words “mission,” “delicious” and “community” into a mission of feeding communities, though the table’s community is the one La Cocina has built among the entrepreneurs sharing its kitchen.
What was corrected from the DOE handbook, and why
- Explanation: The handbook’s explanation of Option A says the table states that applicants without a business plan “must contact” one of La Cocina’s partner organizations. The table’s Business Plan row says they “should contact” one: it is advice, while the row’s requirement is that applicants “must have a business plan that is ready to be put into action.” The site now says “should contact.” The answer is unchanged.
Working it out, step by step
See how the table connects
This question links the table to the article. The table, “Qualifications for La Cocina Applicants,” lists what people need to join. Qualifications are the skills or traits you must have. You must decide how the table supports a central idea of the article.
Sum up each row
Row What it asks of applicants Level of Income earn little money Business Plan have a plan ready to use Viable Product make food that tastes great, stands out and can sell Entrepreneurial Work Ethic be eager and work hard Community Spirit work well with others and spread La Cocina’s spirit Most rows describe people ready to put in real effort.
Connect the table to the article
A central idea of the article is that La Cocina helps cooks develop their businesses. The table shows what La Cocina expects in return. It wants people “motivated and passionate about growing their business.” It says success “requires a lot of heart and hard work.” It expects each cook to be “active in bringing the spirit of La Cocina to the wider world.” So the help goes to people who will give time to their business.
Check each choice
- A is wrong. The table says applicants without a plan “should contact” a partner group for advice. That happens before applying. It doesn’t show La Cocina working with partners to train accepted cooks.
- B is wrong. The table is about getting in, not about leaving La Cocina later.
- C is wrong. The table uses the words “delicious” and “community.” But its community is the cooks who share the kitchen, not neighborhoods La Cocina feeds.
- D is right. The work-ethic row calls for hard work at growing a business. The community row asks cooks to spread La Cocina’s spirit. Both take time and effort.
Choose the answer
The table shows that La Cocina wants cooks ready to work hard at building their businesses. So the answer is D.
Why this answer and not the closest wrong one
A is the closest wrong answer, because “partner organizations” really is in the table. But the table only suggests that people without a business plan get advice from one. It never shows La Cocina teaming up with partners to train its members. D sums up several rows at once.
More questions like this
The original DOE question
The passage “Excerpt from “The Food Business Incubator”” as printed (pages 158–160)
